Email's popularity has had a profound impact on archiving. But not all email archiving tools are created equal. An archiving tool must interface with your email or database system, yet impose few performance penalties against the applications using the email archive. Your company should have retention rules planned ahead of time, and you should consider the need for index/search capabilities to address e-discovery demands. Since the volume of email is constantly growing, an email archiving tool must scale well. All these factors come into play for anyone purchasing an email archiving tool:

Compatibility with your current software
Email archiving tools should interface closely with your existing email or database system. The issue lies in the number of platforms that are compatible and the level of compatibility for each platform. Smaller organizations with no plans to change their email platform might be better off with a narrowly focused email archiving product; large organizations that use more then one email/database system will benefit from a tool with cross-platform compatibility.

E-mail archiving is the process of systematically recording and saving copies of e-mail correspondence for records keeping and documentation purposes.

US courts have issued guidelines on what is called 'e-discovery' or exchanging information using electronic means in legal proceedings. The American Bar Association has, in turn, warned lawyers that e-discovery apparently covers all means of electronic communications – including storage media, personal computers, laptops, PDAs, mobile phones, and so on.

Aside from these sources of information, companies must be prepared to show that their records have not been tampered with. In the same way, they should be able to prove – if needed – that their opponent's records have been tampered with.

The legal requirements straddle into practical issues. Tracing an email trail (for litigation purposes, for example) often results in time spent and people 'dedicated' to a single task – searching through storage media, checking and counter-checking veracity and accuracy of data, and in some cases attempting recovery of information that has been deleted – all under the pressure of heavy penalties in the event of failure.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of an in-house email archiving system verses a hosted system?

Those are really the two principle avenues for email archiving. A "hosted" system is basically an archiving system that is contracted through an outside company. It's an outside service that connects into your email server(s) and captures email as they come through -- moving and storing the email offsite at a remote location. Hosted services are either priced by mailbox-per-year or by the amount of storage consumed.

This white paper describes the integration of the AXIGEN Mail Server with the Mailarchiva archiving solution: the benefits of the integration, how it pro-actively addresses the issues arising for businesses of all sizes that work towards complying with IT Governance standards and concepts, as well as the actual step-by-step configuration procedure:

Today's business world manifests an ongoing concern and hosts frequent discussions regarding Corporate Governance and Information Technology (IT) Governance, facts that result in increased pressure for certain players in the market. Thus, companies dedicated to maintaining their competitive advantages and reputation are re-evaluating their strategies and policies, putting their best efforts into genuinely committing to these concepts.

An often overlooked aspect of complying with the IT Governance discipline is rigorous, safe and standard compliant email archiving. A company's willingness to implement such an archiving system faces two major issues. Firstly, there are the system users, who are sometimes prone to laziness and tend to only save the most important and very recent email messages, while deleting the others. Secondly, introducing such a system yields complex IT administration procedures to be followed which subsequently impose serious overhead.